A Research On Student Engagement In English Classroom Teaching In Junior High School

New curriculum reform advocates "cultivating students’independences, guiding students to investigate, explore, and changing the situation of curriculum implementation that emphasizes too much on reception learning, learning by rote and mechanical training". For a long time, students in English classroom teaching process are mainly passive to accept education and practice mechanically. The teachers have too much power in English class so that the students have little chance to engage and explore. Therefore, it is necessary to carry out a research on student engagement in English classroom teaching in junior high school. According to exploration on the situation of student engagement in English classroom teaching process in junior high school, this present study aims to improve the initiative and positivity of student engagement and offer some practical suggestions.In this study, the primary means of collecting data are questionnaires, interview and classroom observation. One hundred and fifty-seven students and three English teachers are chosen in Wuzhou No.15Middle School to answer the questionnaires and some of them have been interviewed and observed. There are two questionnaires used in this study. Questionnaire of student engagement includes three aspects:behavioral engagement, cognitive engagement and emotional engagement, and the reliability coefficient of this questionnaire is0.8343. Questionnaire of influence factors on student engagement includes three aspects:learning environment, teacher’s teaching and self-efficacy, and the reliability coefficient of this questionnaire is0.8208. The validity of these two questionnaires are so available, each factor loading is above0.3. The purpose of this study attempts to answer the following questions: (1) How is the situation of student engagement in English classroom teaching in junior high school?(2) How is the situation of influence factors on student engagement in English classroom teaching in junior high school?(3) How is the correlation between student engagement and its influence factors?The main findings of investigation and data analysis are as follows:(1) In English classroom teaching process, the situation of behavioral engagement is better than the situation of cognitive engagement and emotional engagement. The degree of behavioral engagement is the highest while the degree of cognitive engagement is the lowest. Students can concentrate, observe discipline, use effective learning strategies, and feel happy and successful in learning. However, they still depend too much on teachers and their abilities of autonomous learning and cooperation need to be improved. In different background information of students, there are significant differences of emotional engagement in different grades and titles, and there is significant difference of behavioral engagement in different titles.(2) For the influence factors on student engagement, the situation of learning environment is better than the situation of teacher’s teaching and self-efficacy. Students have good learning environment and they can adapt teachers’teaching, but their self-efficacies are low. English is a foreign language for the students so that it increases the difficulty for them to learn it well, which leads to their low self-efficacies. In different background information of students, there are significant differences of learning environment and self-efficacy in different grades and titles.(3) Student engagement has significant correlation with its influence factors. Herein, behavioral engagement and emotional engagement have significant correlation with self-efficacy; cognitive engagement has significant correlation with teacher’s teaching.Based on these findings, some suggestions are given:for the teachers, they should change teaching view, innovate teaching mode, create teaching situation, enrich teaching method and cultivate harmonious relationship between teachers and students; for the students, they should strengthen subject consciousness, enhance self-efficacy and acquire learning strategy; for the teaching material, it should have epochal character, authenticity and interestingness according to students’ learning characteristics; for the educational administration departments, they should pay attention to students’ differences and developments, advocating the evaluation mechanism with the combination of formative evaluation and summative evaluation and the combination of self-evaluation and peer-evaluation.